Reading Performance Best Practice, everything seems so important. But we need to design a system with optimized throughput.
I understand that allocating each physical nic to each VM would ensure maximum bandwidth through the NIC.
What about the CPU? RAM? Host Storage?
I am designing our ESXI whitebox and am having a hard time getting the optimum hardware in there.
Requirement/Current Setup
#1 - The ESXI cannot fail, to a certain degree. It will host at least 8 webservers and our whole ERP. *we'd use non-ecc rams, single PSU (these are the tolerance we can live with)
#2 - The VMs have very minimal foot print, since most of them are using our NAS for storage. We symlink almost every required folders to our webservers so only the bare server is running as VM. Every two VMs share 1 gigabit port at the moment. Our NAS is parity protected.
#3 - Currently I'm seeing about 200GB space being used in our current VMWare Worstation.
#4 - We have a plex media server serving media files and it does transcode. The current CPU is an E1230v2. I see some spike to 70% and average load is about 10-20%, and about 40% when 2-3 clients are streaming medias. Please note that our other webservers have not gone public yet so we don't know how much traffic will come in.
We happen to be distributor for many hardwares and rams are not a problem at all. The current server is maxed out with 32GB. My questions are:
#1 - Would I need a dual socket E2620 or a 4930K be more than suffice?
#2 - Would having a ton more rams help?
#3 - Considering #2 and #3 of Requirement/Current Setup, should I go with Raid 10, 4 x 120gb, or 2 x 480GB Raid 1?
#4 - Does it matter if ESXI is sharing the disk with the other VMs? Would it make a difference if an ESXI is installed on small 60gb Raid 1 and the vmdks stored in a different datastore in raid 1/10?